In using a digital camera, it is often desirable to determine the extent of a foreground object in an image. In the art of computer vision, this is called segmentation. Briefly, segmentation refers to analyzing a digital image to identify features or objects in the image. Generally then, segmentation may be considered as partitioning the image into one or more segments where pixels within a given segment have some feature similarity to other pixels within the same given segment. One such feature similarity is a distance that a segment of pixels are from a viewer of the image (or the distance from the camera).
Segmentation can be used, for example, to create specialized effects with the image, such as by blurring the background segment of the image to emphasize the foreground segment of the image, or replacing background segment(s) partially or entirely with another segment. Further, segmentation may helpful in developing three-dimensional image effects by distinguishing between objects or portions of objects based on their distance from the camera, or viewer of the image. Thus, it is with respect to these considerations and others that the present invention has been made.